Blog.Azwan

On June 4th, 2008 at exactly 5PM, the Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi announced that the new price for petrol is RM2.70 a liter, effective midnight.

A lot of people complained offline and also online. Most of the bloggers I know said that he should not have made a drastic decision like that. The 40 per cent increase will definitely bring hardship as the price of goods will go up. If there’s no other choice, he should have raised it at a smaller rate gradually. Then he announced that a RM625 rebate will be given per year to owners of cars of 2000cc and below to offset the increase.

If he had listened, he wont need to pay the RM625 until next year.
If he had listened, he wont have problem to bring down the prices of other goods now.

The only reason I can think of is that he dozed off while the rest of Malaysia is complaining.

But now, there’s another problem with the fuel price. About 3 – 4 years ago, we were only paying RM1.52 when the price is about USD50. Now it is about USD48, why should we pay RM1.92? And what about the prices of lubricants. They did not go down at all. WTF?

Update 20081206 12.10PM : I am quoting this from The Star

At this level, the market price for RON 97 grade petrol should be about RM1.30 per litre, which is 60 sen lower than the RM1.90 per litre Malaysians are currently paying, the analysts said.

Based on a consumption estimate of 27.5 million litres per day, this translates to roughly around RM16.5mil in extra revenue a day for the Government.

We are paying more, and they are making money. So, where does the money goes to now?

I have been making some changes to my old blog lately. I told you that my old blog will be used for my experiments.

Earlier I changed the theme. Last Friday, I changed the permalinks from /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ to /%category%/%postname%/

Uploaded the Permalinks Migration Plugin for WordPress. Traffic started to drop at first, but after a few days it is back to normal and the migration plugin works without any problem.

You can find the details on how to use the Permalinks Migration plugin here.

So, if you are thinking to modify your permalinks, especially after blogging for more than 6 months, you should consider using this plugin.

Got an email from TLA recently about the launching of InLinks. Looks like selling links from your sidebar, header or footer no longer works. Maybe Google’s algorithms are able to detect all that, that made them move to selling links from your posts’ contents. With the links embedded into the content of the page, it might be difficult for Google to detect them, but that doesn’t mean that Google will not be able to.

I just registered my other blog. I mentioned earlier that the other blog will be used for my experiment. Let see whether it can sell or not I;ll post about it later.

Anyway, there’s a promotion currently running at InLinks. They are offering $100 of InLinks to your site for just $1. That’s $99 of free links.

All you need to do is to click here and enter the coupon code 100free at checkout.

If you download the original Simple Pro theme and activates it, you will not be able to see any thumbnails as you are currently seeing on this blog. Even if you use some of the themes from Revolution Two, you would still need to upload the thumbnails and then link the picture you uploaded using custom fields.

In this blog, whenever I upload any picture to any of my post, it will automatically display the thumbnails as you see in the picture above. To achieve that, I use Justin Tadlock get the image wordpress plugin.

How?
1. Upload and activate the plugin
2. Add this line of code to your index.php file, the place where you want to display your thumbnails
<?php echo get_the_image_link(array('Thumbnail','My Thumbnail'),'thumbnail'); ?> for my case, just before the_content
3. And finally modify style.css file to tell it to display it to the left or to the right and also the spacing between the image and text.

/* ---- get the image mod --- */
.thumbnail {
float:right;
margin: 0 0 10px 10px;
}

Get the image plugin allows you to work with custom fields if you prefer using it. I prefer getting the thumbnails which is much easier to manage. It also allows you to set a default image to be displayed if your post does not have any image. I didn’t upload any default, so when I didn’t post any image, no thumbnails will be displayed.

Since it is using thumbnails, you can further set your thumbnail size to suit your theme. From dashboard, go to setting, then miscellaneous and adjust accordingly.

Updated 2009-03-18 – I am currently using a new theme, Whitebeans.

Did you notice the page rank update during the weekend. I did.

Looks like Google is updating its page rank quite often lately. There was once in September 08 where one of my blog fell to PR2 from PR3. Then, during my trip to Port Dickson, my other blog page rank increased from PR0 to PR2 (although it was originally PR4).

This would be a good chance for me to sell links from that site, but if I do that, Google would sure slap me with PR0 again, like it did previously … ha … ha … Selling links will cause you your page rank. If PR is very important to you, forget about it, because once you loose your PR, it will be difficult to get it back. When you sell, you will loose it but without it, you can’t sell. Think about it.

If you are interested to sell links and make more money, check these out:

• BackLinks
• TNX and also
• Text Link Ads

So, did you gain or lose? This site, nothing yet.